Firstly, you can feel it, as anyone that's been somewhere cold. It sparks the awe sense at the scope of it all and yet leaves one with a bit of hopelessness at there being no where to....go. Not entirely different that finding yourself home only to find debris....

05/21/18

Sticking with the planetscape theme here. I wanted to see if I could use Oculus Medium to create icebergs. The planets are a mix of Vue rendered "planetary landscapes" (spherical terrains) and one that I created in Lightwave. I hope you enjoy it!

05/13/18

I'm still learning how to fit Oculus Medium into my workflow. One immediate application is creating different rock formations and this new render features several practice pieces. The landforms in the background were created using World Machine and the sky was created using Lightwave. I hope you enjoy it!

05/08/18

As some of you know Santa Claus brought me an Oculus Rift System for Christmas (I was a good boy last year). By far my favorite application for it so far is the VR sculpting program called Oculus Medium. I've been playing with it for the past few months and have used some bits of pieces of geometry in my renders so far.

This piece is my first where all of the geometry (except the water plane) was modeled using Medium. I expect it to be a major part of my toolbox going forward.

04/27/18

Where I live it seems like Winter has held on long past when it should have ended. It's cold, the trees are still mostly bare and only a few tentative blooms have popped up here and there. You get a warm(ish) day and a few rays of sunlight, however, and life seems ready to burst forth. This piece is my expression of that hope.

On the technical side, I was excited to try out the new "flower" nodes available in Plant Factory. I used them for the tree blooms here and I think there are some exciting possiblities!! I hope you enjoy it!

04/15/18

There was a lot that I liked about "Oceana" but there was a lot that (I felt) didn't work out. Some of the geometry was broken (due to excessive displacement), it wasn't as colorful as I would like, and it took so long to render that I couldn't really make revisions or a multiscreen version.

Consider this scene to be something of a "do over". For starters it only took less than a tenth of the time to render on Shadowfax so I should be able to create a multiscreen version (maybe even a VR panorama) without difficulty.

BTW, It started as an exercise learning Oculus Medium but most of that geometry is covered up with undersea life :-)

03/26/18

Like "Stasis" before it, this render was a learning exercise exploring new shading/modeling techniques using Plant Factory and Vue. I'm specifically interested here in learning Vue's subsurface scattering and getting it to render somewhat economically. Of course, my primary goal is always to create striking and thought-provoking images for your desktop and I hope you feel I've succeeded here :-)

03/22/18

This one is a 3D doodle of sorts; working on different shaders in Vue and modeling in Plant Factory. The techniques I'm working on here will factor into at least the next two renders that I post. As for this one, it may or may not stay in the gallery long term.

03/17/18

I created these blooms using The Plant Factory for an upcoming landscape project. I thought they would make an interesting Lightwave macro render however. When I showed it to Jessie the first thing she said was "oooh Nightshade!" and that sounded like a great title to me. It's not your garden variety that's for certain!
Stay tuned for the landscape (rendering now on Shadowfax)!

03/10/18

The original "Painted Sky" from last year sits at #2 on my all-time Top Rated list so it seemed natural to create a night-time scene. My night version dials back some of the clouds which gave the original its title but I think it still works. I hope you enjoy it at least as much as a "day" version!

03/06/18

Since I created "Strathwood" to render relatively quickly I can be a bit more nimble with making variations. I thought it would be fun to create a winter version but also at the same time have it be a little more colorful than the mostly earth-toned original. Let me know what you think!

03/03/18

Glad to finally be able to post this one! The Vue scene took so long to render that I feared that Shadowfax had hung more than once. It actually did crash one time and I had to restart the whole thing. Regardless, I persisted and I'm happy to be able to share it with you. I used Lightwave 2018's new texturing model for the background planet. Hopefully it was worth the wait.

The scene will need a major rework if I am going to be able to produce multiscreen versions however. The whole thing is set up for 360 rendering but we shall see.

02/26/18

It's been a few months since I've done a "BIG" landscape and some of you have been requesting them. My recent scenes have been more on the intimate side. To be honest I've gotten myself into a bit of trouble using Vue lately in that the scenes I've been dreaming up have been taking far too long to render.

For this scene I wanted to concentrate on keeping the render time manageable (on Bucephalus even) while still keeping the WOW factor. I hope you think I've succeeded with "Strathwood".

EDIT: I've posted a revised version on 2/28. The original will remain in the Pickle Jar if you would like to compare. You will also notice that (by popular demand) I've added wallpapers sized to fit the iPhone X.

02/19/18

Here's something colorful if you are getting tired of winter greys. This render is the result of my experimenting with Plant Factory to create interesting floral patterns. I rendered the scene using Vue but I think I might try a version with Lightwave so I can have a bit more control over the geometry. Let me know what you think!

01/27/18

I finally upgraded my Lightwave to the 2018 version (after skipping the 2015 upgrade) earlier this month and a LOT is different. This render is a texturing exercise, inspired by re-rendering the original Organelle from 2002 for VR. The geometry here was modeled using The Plant Factory rather than Xfrog though. I still have a lot to learn but I thought I would share my progress...

01/19/18

It's been a while since I attempted an underwater render so I felt the time was ripe to dive back in. This time I wanted to use Plant Factory to create my undersea flora and fauna. I wasn't trying to model any real life organisms here, but rather create something fanciful and colorful.

I'm not 100% happy with how everything turned out (after MANY days of rendering at 8K on Bucephalus) but I do think it looks nice enough to share while I consider revisions. Let me know what you think!

01/06/18

My first render of 2018 was built using trees that evolved from both "The Standing Stones" and "Animus". It also contains plants that foreshadows my next render. I guess it has a foot in the past and a foot in the future. Truly a passageway :-)